is not to be taken from the plough and made an officer in a day;” and he was answered wrathfully, at great length, in the Boston Evening Post, by a writer signing himself “A New England Man.”  The provincial officers, on the other hand, and especially those of New England, being no less narrow and prejudiced, filled with a sensitive pride and a jealous local patriotism, and bred up in a lofty appreciation of the merits and importance of their country, regarded British superciliousness with a resentment which their strong love for England could not overcome.  This feeling was far from being confined to the officers.  A provincial regiment stationed at Half-Moon, on the Hudson, thought itself affronted by Captain Cruikshank, a regular officer; and the men were so incensed that nearly half of them went off in a body.  The deportment of British officers in the Seven Years War no doubt had some part in hastening on the Revolution.

What with levelling Montcalm’s siege works, planting palisades, and grubbing up stumps in their bungling and laborious way, the regulars found abundant occupation.  Discipline was stiff and peremptory.  The wooden horse and the whipping-post were conspicuous objects in the camp, and often in use.  Caleb Rea, being tender-hearted, never went to see the lash laid on; for, as he quaintly observes, “the cries were satisfactory to me, without the sight of the strokes.”  He and the rest of the doctors found active exercise for such skill as they had, since fever and dysentery were making scarcely less havoc than the bullets at Ticonderoga.  This came from the bad state of the camps and unwholesome food.  The provincial surgeons seem to have been very little impressed with the importance of sanitary regulations, and to have thought it their business not to prevent disease, but only to cure it.  The one grand essential in their eyes was a well-stocked medicine-chest, rich in exhaustless stores of rhubarb, ipecacuanha, and calomel.  Even this sometimes failed.  Colonel Williams reports “the sick destitute of everything proper for them; medicine-chest empty; nothing but their dirty blankets for beds; Dr. Ashley dead, Dr. Wright gone home, low enough; Bille worn off his legs,—­such is our case.  I have near a hundred sick.  Lost a sergeant and a private last night."[641] Chaplain Cleaveland himself, though strong of frame, did not escape; but he found solace in his trouble from the congenial society of a brother chaplain, Mr. Emerson, of New Hampshire, “a right-down hearty Christian minister, of savory conversation,” who came to see him in his tent, breakfasted with him, and joined him in prayer.  Being somewhat better, he one day thought to recreate himself with the apostolic occupation of fishing.  The sport was poor; the fish bit slowly; and as he lay in his boat, still languid with his malady, he had leisure to reflect on the contrasted works of Providence and man,—­the bright lake basking amid its mountains, a dream of wilderness beauty, and the swarms of harsh humanity on the shore beside him, with their passions, discords, and miseries.  But it was with the strong meat of Calvinistic theology, and not with reveries like these, that he was accustomed to nourish his military flock.